Archive for radio
Karl Marx on seeing Stalin
May 1st, 2010 radio
(from Old Harry’s Game)
Marx: You recognise me comrade?
Stalin: Your face rings a bit of a bell
Marx: I’m Karl Marx!
Stalin: Karl Marx…Karl Marx…no, don’t tell me…
Marx: You totally discredited Marxism. Have you no compunction for the misery you caused? Have you any idea how cold it was in the sodding museum library? I froze my arse off for years working on that theory! All that time! Wasted! I could have been dating women! Taking nice holidays! I could have learnt to play the saxophone!
Stalin: People always say that.
Hamish and Dougal – Musical Evening
February 12th, 2010 Writing, radio
I’m writing down the script for Hamish and Dougal to learn how to write comedy. I’m writing a skit. So far, it is too risque because of its visual gags which means it could be scrapped and I’ve got a timeline to meet. Hamish & Dougal is a laugh every other second.
[Door Opens]
Hamish!
Dougal!
You’ve had your tea!
No…
As a matter of fact I’ve just finished mine!
Mine too, by the looks of it.
I’ll be looking forward to your company later on.
How will that be Dougal?
Hamish, I’m having a musical evening!
Ah…I’m the same after a baked bean supper
An entertainment! Jinks! What fun we’ll have!
There will be hijinks on the Glen as we speak!
I don’t doubt it!
I’m bursting to know, what on earth have you laid on?
I don’t know but it’s stained the back of my kilt
No….
No no. The entertainment.
Oh, a rare treat Hamish! Did you ever see the Edinburgh tattoo?
Oh, I glimsped it once when you were changing your sporran.
I am talking about the great national spectacle.
So am I!
Oh what am I thinking of. Come away, man, rest your weary feet, pull up a chair, there is one in the celler.
[Sheep bleats.]
Glory be! What was that!
Oh, I’m in the middle of making a haggis.
That’s handy, I’ve just been to the bakers. Could you fancy a bannercake?
I could, old friend, but would I respect it in the morning?
That’s what you got to ask yourself.
High Table, Lower Orders
February 3rd, 2010 radio
Everything to love about Mark Taverner is in this show – Murder, insect specialists, claret drinkers, food lovers, pompous farts, wheezes, lazy old men, reunions with former girlfriend, pulling pants down to moon at authorities and rudeness. Especially the rudeness.
“Listen to this,”
“On the face of it…”
“Ugh.”
“What?”
“Unnecessary verbiage. What’s wrong with ‘outwardly’, or ’superficially’?”
“‘Superficially, this ancient seat of learning…’”
“No! No! No! What is this? A heroic attempt to win the world cliche record? Just ‘Cambridge’.”
“Superficially, Cambridge looks as it always has…”
[undertone] “…a bastion of privilege.”
“A bastion of privilege. Ugh! Shut up and listen!”
“But as the colleges prepare for their carol services…”
“Oh no! OH NO! Spare us in my mercy! Don’t tell me – ‘truly this is a bleak mid-winter for higher education’.”
“…truly this is a bleak mid-winter for higher education.”
“Tell me, what first attract you to a career in journalism?”
“Alright, so I’ve just got a bit rusty.”
“Rusty?”
“Go on then, you do it.”
“‘Superficially Cambridge looks the same’, colon. You know what one of those are, don’t you?”
“Ha ha.”
“‘Majestic dons make pronouncements of great brilliance and quaff clarets of great vintage.’”
“A bit OTT.”
“SSsssh!”
“‘The picture is forced. As colleges prepare for their carol services, the hymm they intone: Money don’t get everything it’s true; What it don’t get i can’t use; I want money.’ How’s that?”
“Bit flurry. Bit over-written”
Educating Rita vs An Education
January 7th, 2010 radio, screen
In ‘Educating Rita’, Rita is a hairdresser by day and an open university student by night. Rita is not just seeking an education – she yearns to wear the dress that an educated person wears: the type of person who could speak cleverly, enjoy music, art or even provide a erudite commentary on Literature or Art. In short, Rita wants to be different from the people around her. She seeks this from Frank, an alcoholic lecturer who is sick of the culture and academia that Rita seeks and wants Rita to retain her charm, her spontaneity, her real self just the way she is. Frank thinks very little of Literature (ie, that capital L literature) because it has nothing to do with real life; it is empty.
In ‘An Education’ – a film based on a memoir/essay of Lyn Barber, the quarrel with the enjoyment of concerts, theatre, jazz and art is similar. Jenny thinks that attending these things, having the glamour of an older man courting her meant she would be thought of as sophisticated. (Jenny wasn’t completely naive. She knew things have to be paid for with money, or with her virginity.)
Unlike Rita who eventually learns from Trish’s (her glamourous room-mate who enjoys classical music, poetry, theatre) suicide that the dress of an educated person is nothing but a facade hiding the emptiness of her life, Jenny considers her escape to Oxford as a right decision from troublesome real life of a cheating boyfriend, of parents who claim to know everything.
Both stories have different ideas about education. ‘An Education’ never resolved Jenny’s question to her headmistress: what is she, a woman, to look forward to after being educated? When marriage stopped being an option, Jenny decides she really wants to go to Oxford where she could read English. It seems to me that the writers all agree that education is a right escape just because it is perceived as a better goal than getting married, having babies, wasting her brilliant talent. I don’t agree it is a better goal. It’s just the paths we choose to take. I much prefer how ‘Educating Rita’ handled it. Rita wasn’t sure about getting married and having babies early – not that she thought it was a poorer option but that she wanted to be someone else for a change – an educated person – because her life was getting her down. On achieving her goal, Rita discovers that she loves idea of education so much that she didn’t want to question what she learnt and she was wrong – she had to question what she learnt, and not merely accept authority.
Both characters realise at some point in their story that they are reading too much into the choices of entertainment: for Rita, a dress; for Jenny, a pretend sophistication. Yes, entertainments are what they are but to dismiss it, to rubbish such things because it doesn’t reflect real life? Jenny had problems with real life and successfully escaped into Oxford. Rita says that the tutorial hours are her escape from real life. Yet the writers want me to think real life is the tops and that artistic creations should show real life in it? I’m unconvinced.
Painting from life?
December 31st, 2009 elsewhere, radio
Listening to Van Gogh: Seeing Red on BBC it occurred to me how different his paintings were to his life. Van Gogh lived an isolated life and his intense relationships with Theo and Gaugin hinted of loneliness yet his art was not lonely. They were complete and happy to me.
Hopper who was not lonely, had friends and a supportive wife in Jo knew loneliness so well.
Barbara Novak tells a story about a party she and O’Doherty threw in the Sixties, towards the end of the Hoppers’ lives. Edward and Jo were the first to arrive. They sat down next to each other on a settee, and as the other guests – many of whom were the most successful artists of that new generation – piled in, they thought the Hoppers seemed happy and left them alone. Halfway through the party Novak turned to look at them and saw that a large empty space had been left around the Hoppers’ sofa. It was an image straight out of one of his paintings: even in a crowded room, they radiated isolation – together.
‘We don’t know what she died of,’ Novak says when I ask about Jo. ‘I think she died for lack of him. And,’ she adds, ‘he would have died for lack of her. It really was a folie à deux.’
On Chain Reaction (series 3 ep 3)
December 28th, 2009 radio
Phill Jupitus to John Lloyd on Stephen Fry:
PJ: I love Fry so much. The fact that you let me, take the piss out of Stephen on that show quite relentlessly [Laughs]. I’m like an oik to that man. He could crush me like a bug. But he doesn’t. Why not? Do you think he fancies me? [Crowd laughs] Come on, tell me. Is that it? A sexual thing? Did you just get me on to pacify him? [Crowd is helpless.] Is it like (mimicks Fry perfectly) “Well, don’t you forget to book the man Candy John … Maaaah…Where’s Pip? Maaah……”
JL: Have that font washed and sent to my tent.
PJ: Oh no, I’m just a boy whore!
Wicked wicked wicked impression of Fry. Does he really go Maaaah?
A lovely set up and punch line
December 3rd, 2009 radio
This is from Unbelievable Truth: On wooden postcards: Episode aired 2009-04-06
Lucy Porter: I once got a wooden Valentines’ card. I’m just showing off. I thought maybe someone did wooden postcards and they didn’t like it.
David Mitchell: Er, no, they didn’t. Sorry. But well done on the wooden Valentines’ card.
Chris Addison: Did you put out?
[A buzz from Graeme Garden. Interruption by Lucy.]
David Mitchell: Sorry, Lucy’s still boasting about her wooden post card.
Lucy Porter: I just want to make clear that I didn’t put out.
David Mitchell: You didn’t put out? Was it on fire?
Lucy Porter: No, it’s a term for having sexual intercourse.
David Mitchell: Oh well, that would explain why I wouldn’t know it.
[Laughter. Applause.]
David Mitchell: So you didn’t. Right. So it was essentially a waste of wood.
[Laughter. Applause.]
BRILLIANT.
From Our Man In Havana
Listening to this at work in between loud and long conversations, this jumped at me.
“I told them even if I’d known I wouldn’t have stopped you. I said you were working for something important, not for someone’s notion of a global war that may never happen. That fool dressed up as a Colonel said something about “your country”. I said, “What do you mean by his country? A flag someone invented two hundred years ago? The Bench of Bishops arguing about divorce and the House of Commons shouting Ya at each other across the floor? Or do you mean the UTC and the British Railways and the Co-op? You probably think it’s your regiment if you ever stop to think, but we haven’t got a regiment – he and I.” They tried to interrupt and I said, “Oh I forgot. There is something greater than one’s country, isn’t there? You taught us that with your League of Nations and your Atlantic Pact NATO and UNO and SEATO. But they don’t mean any more to most of us than all the other letters, USA and USSR. And we don’t believe you any more when you say you want peace and justice and freedom.” I said I sympathised with the French officers in 1940 who looked after their families; they didn’t put their careers first. A country is more a family than a Parliamentary System.”
“My God, you said all that?”
“Yes. It was quite a speech.”
“Did you believe it?”
“Not all of it. They haven’t left us much to believe, have they? – even disbelief. I can’t believe in anything bigger than a home, or anything vaguer than a human being.”
When the plane lands and the control tower in Changi comes into view, does the heart feel heavy or light?
Where one chooses to put up one’s feet cannot be derived by drawing two columns and labeling one Pros and the other Cons. It is a feeling of inexplicable contentment, of sentimentality, of (even) relief. To some the cause of such feelings of goodwill is family – that tiny nation of two, three, four or more. For persons whose family does not generate such feelings of goodwill, perhaps friends play the part. What if neither friends nor family play the part – what then gives the heart it’s lightness? Adventure, curiosity, strangeness, newness. Or is it routine, old ways, traditions, familiar sounds?
On Time
July 26th, 2009 radio
Think about it this way, if I say a long time has passed, in fact I have used two metaphors because time cannot literally be long or short – not a piece of string. We’ve used a description from space and applied it to this abstract notion of time. When I said time has passed, that’s also metaphor because what really passes is a train or ships at night, not time. Time doesn’t literally go somewhere. So it’s not just that we need metaphor from space to talk about time, we need it to think about time cause we have not other way of conceptualising it, of visualising it.
Fry’s English Delight – Metaphors at 22:58
